Postcards from the Field: Reflections on Being Participant/Researcher in Participatory Research

In this chapter, I play with Jacques Derrida’s discussion and use of the postcard, of envois, and take up Jasper Johns’ invitation to “Take an object, do something with it, and then do something else with it” as I share reflections on a research project that engaged children as researchers. I bring together multiple texts of the research space – anecdotal postcards to J (Jacques and Jasper), reflective musings, and theoretical marginalia – that at once inform and guide each other in conversation as I meditate on the role/s of the participatory researcher, the opening (and closing) of a reciprocally respectful research space, and deconstruction at work within curricular research and the curriculum of research.